Visit to the Meiji Shrine

We visited the Meiji shrine today. Before I get into that, I'll mention that I'm acquainted with one of the priests who works at the shrine, but we didn't see him today. It's a pity, because he's devilishly hard to get hold of. We've tried telephone (to the shrine; we don't have a home number) and email, and we don't have any other contact information. I don't have any ideas left for getting hold of him.

The shrine and grounds are impressive. The first picture is the Torii gate (rhymes with story) near the entrance to the shrine. There are two of these, both about the same size. The huge posts are each cut from a single Japanese cypress, which the sign tells us were 1,500 years old. The walk to the shrine stretches over about a kilometer of wide, graveled walkway (you can get a feel for how wide the path is from the picture). The walkway is surrounded by trees, and there was an old man with a wide broom walking his way along, sweeping up all the leaves that fell onto the path. This struck me as a sisyphean task, especially when autumn comes around, but the walkway is remarkably well groomed, so I have to hand it to the old guy with the broom.

The shrine itself is a huge stone courtyard with two spots for trees. On the right is a single tree surrounded by racks of votive tablets. Apparently, what you do is buy a wooden tablet for 500 yen (about 3 or 4 dollars) and then write a prayer on it. You then hang this around the divine tree, and the priests will offer up the prayers at some point. I'm not sure what that involves -- burning them or something, perhaps -- but the practice seems very popular. There were several thousand of the tablets hanging there in rows and columns and stacks, completely surrounding the tree. The tablets were written in a variety of languages, so this seems to be a popular practice. The handful I noticed mostly seemed to be things like "that my family may be happy and prosperous" or "I want my boyfriend to find his way back to me."

Further into the shrine is the area where you go to offer prayers. They have rows of tables with wooden slats instead of a surface. The idea is that you chuck a few coins into the slats and they fall through into a collection box of some kind underneath. You then clap your hands a few times (to make the gods of the shrine pay attention, I think) and then bow to the enshrined gods while offering up any prayers you have. I took a miss on this bit (something about the second commandment), but it still made me think.

One of the things that "you have to be there" to notice is that the prayer room of the Meiji shrine really does have a certain feel to it. It was very much a spiritual feeling--like a good home, or like a temple. It crossed my mind that while the gods of that temple may be a little hard of hearing, I think those prayers are still being heard. I suppose the visitors won't all get the things they're asking for, but I think that's all right. Getting what you want is not really the purpose of prayer anyway.

The outer part of the shrine has a large garden that has been cultivated for several centuries. The garden is spectacularly well groomed. Of course, there's something kind of funny about the way they do it. The garden is supposed to give you a kind of 'back to nature' feel, so everything is arranged in a flowing, organic way. By comparison, English style gardens are a lot more geometrically arranged.

The picture here is from the iris garden. You can't see it, but every single one of those irises has a little wooden tablet with several kanji characters on it posted next to the plant. I can't read very well still but I think they might have been family names. Perhaps you can donate to the shrine and get an iris planted?

You might also notice the fence along the side of the walkway. The fence is made entirely of woven bamboo strips poked into the ground, woven into an interlocking pattern. And in a wonderful "you're in Japan" moment, as soon as we walked past that wooden canopy, there was a rest area filled with vending machines. I got a milky white drink with little chewy cubes in it, and it tasted great.

We also went to Harajuku and looked at all the costumed teenagers wandering about. I ate some sukiyaki, and we found the Apple store in Shibuya (after much asking around--most of the people we asked had never even heard of the company, which made things dead difficult). Oh, and it's gotten late, so I think I'll have to wrap it up now.